Saturday, December 3, 2011

When I started to clean up my financial life and give up using credit, and loans something strange happened. The more people I told what Amy and I were doing, the more we discovered people were shocked, and some even wanted to argue with what we were doing.

Using credit to make purchases is fine for some people. For Amy and I it was not a viable option because we had shown through past behavior that we could not handle it. When we started sharing our goal with others it was almost like people took offense to what we were doing. They started saying things like, "why on earth would you not use credit card or a loan", "we only use credit cards for emergencies", "we get miles from it so that is why we use credit cards", or my favorite, "we get a 0% interest rate". All of these responses were in response to us changing our buying habits and sharing it with people. These unsolicited responses were people protecting what they knew was wrong for them but ultimately did not know any other way to live.

It was like we were breaking away from the crowd and the crowd desperately wanted us to stay with them to prove they were right. I had heard of stories of things like this happening where you make changes in your life, and people that love, and care about you, become uncomfortable with what you are doing, but we were actually living it! This type of thing also happened when Amy and I were adopted by Christ. All of a sudden we were telling people of what had happened in our lives, and we got luke warm to hostile responses from long time friends. Please don't take this as a complaint because it is not. We are blessed to have changed our lives financially, and even more blessed to be adopted by Christ. My point is that sometimes the things that we change for the better will alienate those around us that are comfortable with the status quo. You can't be afraid to break away from the crowd and do what is right for you. Someone else's discomfort can't be your concern when making changes in your life. Examples might be eating habits, smoking, drugs, alcohol, loans, watching TV, how you dress, and even a sinful society.

The other weird side effect was that the people that we might have lost as friends, or stopped being close with, were replaced with friends that shared our new goals which we became even closer to.